Project Members

Leonardo Lancia

Phonetic constraints on lexical items

Why some sequences of sounds are more frequent than others in world's languages? Our assumption was that physiological constraints are mainly responsible for these distributional biases but that, when phonetic constraints are observed in the context of specific languages, phonetic factors interact with the structural features of these languages. Studying language specific instantiations of these distributional biases let us observe the interaction between phonetic laws and the laws governing linguistic behavior at other levels of description (eg. lexical and prosodic phonology).

Publications

Lancia, L., Fuchs, S., Rochet-Capellan, A., Hartinger, M. Is there similar evidence for the labial-coronal effect in German as in French? A multivariate portrait. Summer school ìCognitive and Physical Models of Speech Production, Speech Perception and Production-Perception Interactionî, to be held in Berlin, Germany, September, 2010 (Oral presentation).